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The green energy entrepreneur and Labour donor Dale Vince is in line to receive damages from the publisher of the Daily Mail after claiming it used his picture to mislead millions of readers.
Vince, who has given more than £5m to Labour over several years, took legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over an article, published in June 2023, headlined “Labour repays £100,000 to sex pest donor”.
The donor referred to in the headline was not Vince, but his picture accompanied the article. The pictures showed Vince holding a Just Stop Oil banner.
The high court initially threw out Vince’s data protection claim against the newspaper over the article. That decision has been overturned by the court of appeal.
The Mail’s headline actually referred to the fact that Labour was repaying money to a former donor, Davide Serra. In 2002, an employment tribunal heard that Serra had made sexist comments to a female colleague, which were found to amount to unlawful harassment related to sex.
The pictures of Vince were published in print, where the headline referred to a “‘sex harassment’ donor”, and on the Mail+ app. They were changed online to photographs depicting Serra 47 minutes after the story’s publication, but the original pictures of Vince remained in the print edition.
Vince argued that the article unfairly used his personal data and that the photos would lead many readers to believe that he had been accused of sexual harassment.
Throughout the legal arguments in the case, ANL’s lawyers argued that the full context of the article and pictures was clear to anyone who read the whole headline and story. Serra was identified as the subject of the headline early on in the piece.
ANL had also argued that Vince’s data claim was also an attempt to “resurrect” a libel action against the Mail in 2024 for the same story. A high court judge initially threw out the data protection claim in June last year.
However, that decision has now been overturned by three court of appeal judges. In a 20-page ruling, the judge, Sir Geoffrey Vos, said Vince was trying to seek redress for “an obvious injustice perpetrated by a wrongdoer who was taking every possible legal point against him”.
Vos said ANL had “failed to take care not to publish misleading information and images in the articles”, as required by the editors’ code of practice adopted by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, of which ANL is a member.
“The information in the headline juxtaposed next to the images of Mr Vince would have misled many casual readers into thinking that Mr Vince was the ‘sex harassment donor’ referred to in the headline,” he said, adding that ANL had “no real prospect” of defending Vince’s damages claim.
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Responding to the ruling, Vince claimed that it would have far-reaching implications for media coverage.
“The fallacy at the heart of libel law is the assumption that people read both headlines and articles in full,” he said. “We all know this is not true; we all scan headlines and think we know what the story is.
“But that element of libel law has stood for over three decades, while the internet grew, social media came into the world, and our attention spans famously shrank. Libel law in our country is not fit for purpose. It needs updating for the modern era.”
ANL declined to comment.
